#8: Reading Butler through Berger with Professor Griselda Pollock

Nancy Spero, Performance, 1990




















27 March | 5.00 - 6.30pm | Room 1, LAHRI (29-31 Clarendon Place) | All welcome!

Guest Seminar from Griselda Pollock, and a Wine Reception


We are delighted to announce that, for our final session of the semester, we have invited Professor Griselda Pollock (School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds) to lead us through a reading of Anne Emmanuelle-Berger's The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender (2014). In particular, we will be focusing on the final chapter in Berger's book, 'Roxana's Legacy: Feminism and Capitalism in the West'. Access to the pdf can be found here. In addition to this, Pollock has provided a reading guide to Berger's work, which can be downloaded here. Pollock's guide provides useful theoretical and historical context to Berger's arguments and her source material, so we recommend reading it alongside the chapter. 

 Griselda Pollock is professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art, and has been based at Leeds since 1977. Having trained as an art historian, she also works on film and cultural studies. Known for her work on reshaping art history methodologies to recognise feminist, queer, and postcolonial creative perspectives, Pollock's major publications include Old Mistresses: Women, Art & Ideology (1981) and Vision and Difference (1988). Latterly, Pollock has turned to focus on trauma, cultural memory, and representations of the Holocaust. Her most recent publications include: Charlotte Salomon: The Nameless Artist in the Theatre of Memory 1941-2 (2018) and Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, ed. with Max Silverman (2013). 

In The Queer Turn in Feminism, Berger re-evaluates the intellectual genealogy of theories of gender, sex, and sexuality in France and the US. Herself writing from a doubly Franco-American perspective, Berger understands contemporary gender theory as a distinctly American production, yet one forged through the importation of 'French thought'. She cites, for example, Butler's use of Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida in her formulation of gender performativity. In turn, Berger considers how 'French thought' has been changed through this theatrically inflected conception of gender, spearheaded by Butler. Berger's study has surfaced at a moment in which queer theory has been proclaimed 'dead' by several leading scholars, and in which 'post-feminist' discourse has been gaining critical purchase. Not only does Berger subject these trends to fresh critique, she argues for the intellectual magnanimity of transnational exchange and dialogue. 

 'Roxana's Legacy' tackles the historical intersection of the beginnings of feminist thought and of captialism in the West. Berger examines "the forms and effects [...] of this originary 'debt' of Western feminism toward capitalism and bourgeois ideology" (8). In this chapter, Berger compels readers to ask what role the complex transnational evolution of gender theory plays in shaping the historical link between feminism and capitalism. Our session will reflect on the place of Butler's work in this renewed genealogy of gender theory.

 Since it's our last session before the Easter vacation, we will be deviating from the norm and hosting a small wine reception, complete with nibbles, after the meeting. Join us for what promises to be a very invigorating discussion!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robinson session 3: Robinson and the Decolonial

Thursday 29th February November | 5:30 – 7:00pm | The Alumni Room (School of English) We are happy to announce interdisciplinary reading group Quilting Points will return after a short break. Following our readings of  Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition  last term, we will begin this year by reading two short essays in which Robinson develops the ideas of that book in relation to thinking about the legacy of decolonial struggles on the African continent. In ' The appropriation of Fanon ', Robinson takes issue with what he sees as postcolonial theory's depoliticized conception of Fanon, and opens this up into a critique of the "native bourgeoisie", which he then develops in ' In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth ', into thinking through the association between Pan-Africanism and the form of the Nation-State.  Everyone (at whatever level of study & whether enrolled at the University or not)  is welcome, and no prior familiarity w
Read more

CFP | Quilting Points 2024: Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance

  Quilting Points Call for Papers     CFP | Quilting Points 202 4 :    Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance     01 st Ma y 2024    Call for Papers – PGR-led symposium   Deadline: 15th December     Abstracts: 250 -words    The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures that emerged from capitalism (2)   Cedric Robinson – Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2021)   Originally published in 1983, Cedric Robinson’s work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition has proved critical in thinking through the relationship between race and capitalism in a global context . It has experienced a renewed wave of interest over the last decade because of the purchase that some of his concepts such as ‘racial capitalism’ and the ‘Black Radical Tradition
Read more

Sylvia Wynter and The Tempest: 'Beyond Miranda's Meanings'

Image
Thursday 18 May | 5:30 - 7:00pm | Meeting Room G01 Written as an afterword to Out of the Kumbla (1994), the first edited collection of critical essays on Caribbean women’s literature, ' Beyond Miranda's Meaning: Un/silencing the "Demonic Ground" of Caliban's "Woman" ' analyses the ways in which race complicates gender, taking a discussion of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a point of departure. According to Sylvia Wynter, this play not only posits Caliban as ‘the irrational native subject’ but in doing so also relegates 'Caliban’s "woman"' to a space of non-being. As such, the play reenacts the founding structure of the onto-epistemic order of Western Man. Analysing the function of the “ontological absence” of the Black female subject position, it is in this essay that Wynter coins the term “demonic ground”, which has since been taken up by various scholars in different ways, most notably by Katherine McKittrick. As always this sessio
Read more